Week #15: Making Soul Moves

May 24
2 min read

Updated: Jun 28

Something is off at my favorite restaurants.

It's happened enough times recently to take notice. "It feels like the food is not being made with love," is how my partner described it.

This week I released a story online that I wrote last year and had been trying to get published since. I took my time with it - commissioned artwork, wrote music for it, spent a weekend writing the social media posts and the perfect email for it.

I put care into it.

Aside from my blog, I also publish on Substack, where I have zero readership. That day I posted the story on there and wrote a thoughtless caption for it.

A few hours later my partner walked in. "Can I give you some feedback? This post sounds like a robot wrote it."

I pointed at my dozens of posts with zero hearts, zero comments. But I knew what she meant.

The responses aren't the point.

Later in the week I interviewed the writer Luis Alberto Urrea. We spoke about how at times you have to make what he calls a "soul move" rather than a career move. Something you do for no other reason than because you feel called to. These are his books of poetry, travel writing.

“Aren't you bothered by the amount of time you have to put into something like that, knowing it will have no payoff?" I asked.

He told me how that the return on these is something else. “It’s the couples who tell me they read it to each other before bed. The people that tell me they saw themselves written into it.”

Again, I'd missed the point.

My partner and I ended the week at a cabin in the woods. We picked up food at one of our staples on the way out of Chicago. This one also left a lot to be desired.

Contrast that to the cabin itself — Small, old, nothing fancy about it, but cared for. It felt like someone put their heart into it.

That’s how I’m trying to live.

Here are the hours I spent on my soul this week: